"People that aren’t using breeding values are doing the job with only half the information available to them," he says.

"On individual animals everyone’s got to be careful, mistakes can be made and it may not necessarily work.

"If you look at it in multiples or an average of a group of animals it works perfectly."

Mr Silcock concedes environmental differences across Australia make rating rams against each other and matching them to stock difficult.

"It’s just a reality …we are improving quite dramatically and there’s plenty of graphs out there to prove that.

"I’m more interested, to a large degree, on in-flock breeding values because the waters aren’t being muddied by all the other environmental factors and everything else that’s happening around Australia," he says.

"What I would like to think is the animals that do really well in that comparison then ideally will also stack up pretty well with ASBVs."

"People that aren't using breeding values are doing the job with only half the information available to them."

Tom Silcock, Balmoral Sire Evaluation Trial chairman

The Balmoral trial involves joining 20 rams to 60 ewes from a common flock.

Lambs are then tracked for at least two years, during which time they’ll be assessed on a multitude of things.

The sheep are even left to develop worms so they can be tested on their resistance.